Guest access in Microsoft Teams

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Guest Access is new in Teams. It’s one of the features customers asked for the most. We’re still working on it, enhancing its capabilities. Here’s how you can keep up with our progress on Guest Access and tell us your thoughts:

Guest access in Microsoft Teams allows teams in your organization to collaborate with people outside your organization by granting them access to teams and channels.

Anyone with a business or consumer email account, such as Outlook, Gmail, or others, can participate as a guest in Teams with full access to team chats, meetings, and files.

Guest access is included with all Office 365 Business Premium, Office 365 Enterprise, and Office 365 Education subscriptions. No additional Office 365 license is necessary. Guest access is a tenant-level setting in Microsoft Teams and is turned off by default.

A guest is someone who isn't an employee, student, or member of your organization. They don't have a school or work account with your organization. For example, guests may include partners, vendors, suppliers, or consultants. Anyone can be added as guest in Microsoft Teams. This means that anyone with a business (with an Azure Active Directory account) or consumer email account (with Outlook.com, Gmail.com or others) can participate as a guest in Teams with full access to teams chats, meetings and files.
All guests in Teams are covered by the same compliance and auditing protection as the rest of Office 365, and can be managed securely within Azure AD.

Organizations using Teams can provide external access to teams, documents in channels, resources, chats, and applications to their partners, while maintaining complete control over their own corporate data. All guests in Teams are covered by the same compliance and auditing protection as the rest of Office 365, and guests can be managed securely within Azure Active Directory.

Teams is built upon Office 365 Groups and provides a new way to access shared assets for an Office 365 group. Teams is the best solution for persistent chat among group/team members. Office 365 Groups is a service that provides cross-application membership for a set of shared team assets, like a SharePoint site or a Power BI dashboard, so that the team can collaborate effectively and securely.